Just way too scary

Today's knitting entertainment was Babe: Pig in the City. I think I hated it.

I expected something fairly light, maybe kind of funny, heartwarming, etc., but what I got was something more on the order of "Brazil," or one of the other Terry Gilliam movies, "Time Bandits," maybe. That is to say, not bad, per se, but certainly not what I was expecting from what has been advertised as a children's movie, and which was rated G. I love Terry Gilliam, and love both of those movies, but they're not children's movies, and neither is this "Babe."

I always dislike spoilers, but this movie is four years old, so surely anyone who wanted to see it already has, and frankly, I think this kind of movies needs spoilers. But if you don't want to read them, don't, please.

Babe, the pig who herds sheep, has won the national sheep herding competition and returned home a champion. Before too long, though, Babe causes a terrible accident in which the farmer is nearly killed. Laid up, he isn't able to do his chores around the farm; his wife tries to pick up the slack, but it isn't long before the bank is foreclosing on the farm and they're about to lose everything.

Babe has been invited to appear at a state fair, and promised a "generous appearance fee," so Babe and the farmer's wife fly to the United States, where things continue to go wrong. A drug-sniffing dog, showing off for Babe, causes the farmer's wife to be strip searched, which causes them to miss their plane. None of the hotels will take "pets," so they end up at a surreal hotel full of hipper-than-thou chimpanzees, a choir of cats, loads of dogs (including an elderly disabled dog on a wheeled cart), an orangutan, and Mickey Rooney. And if you think clowns are scary, well, he's one of the scarier ones I've seen.

The clown incorporates Babe into his act by promising him a generous reward, but somehow Babe causes another terrible accident, there's a fire in the children's hospital where they're performing, and the clown is taken off to the hospital--the scene with the clown, still in his make-up, on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face is one of the worst, I think.

With the humans out of the house, the animals are starving. The chimps and Babe go out to try to find some food. The chimps trick Babe into going into a warehouse guarded by a pit bull, who chases Babe through the city, obviously intending to kill hiim. The pit bull's chain gets entangled and he's drowning, hanging upside down with his head in the canal (this "city" has canals, like Venice), and Babe saves him, which makes the pit bull into Babe's advocate, and they try to organize the animals in the pet hotel into some kind of cohesive group.

Soon, though, the opera-loving neighbor across the street turns them in, and the police show up with nooses, cages, and a woman in a white coat, obviously the leader of some sort of animal-testing lab. Terrible scenes of the animals in panic, one of the woman luring a small chimp into a cage by tossing a transistor radio into it, nets thrown over the animals . . . on and on. The sequence ends with the animal control vans driving away; something has caught on the disabled dog's cart, though, and he's being pulled along on the cart, through the street, with the scary nighttime traffic shown from the dog's perspective.

This is the point at which I nearly stopped watching, and this is the point at which, if I was a child, I imagine I would have been huddled in a ball with my hands over my eyes. I know that children now are certainly more sophisticated than I was as a child, but I think this movie is way too dark for a child.

The scariest thing I watched as a child was "Lassie," and everytime Lassie was in trouble, I would run into the kitchen and hide, leaning against the refrigerator, so afraid that something bad was going to happen that I couldn't bear to watch. Maybe it's just my inate sympathy and love for animals, maybe it's just that I can't stand to see animals being hurt and humiliated, since they can't speak up or stand up for themselves.

I kept watching, though, because I knew if I stopped that last scene would be the one that stayed with me, and I knew that eventually there would be a happy ending.

Babe saves the animals from the animal-testing lab, of course, he is reunited with the farmer's wife, and everyone lives happily ever after. What's next? "Babe: Armageddon?"